Published 4:39 pm, Saturday, February 25, 2012

A sliver of Melissa Trotter’s heart may soon determine the fate of Larry Ray Swearingen, the man convicted of killing her more than a decade ago.

Having assembled a bevy of scientific evidence and forensic experts, attorneys for Swearingen and prosecutors from the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office will present their arguments in a court-ordered hearing Monday.

The hearing, expected to take up to two weeks, is in the 9th state District Court of Judge Fred Edwards, beginning at 9:30 a.m. Monday.

Swearingen, 40, was sentenced to death by lethal injection in 2000 for the 1998 abduction and murder of Trotter, a 19-year-old college student from Willis.

Witnesses said they saw Trotter leaving the Lone Star College-Montgomery campus with Swearingen on Dec. 8, 1998. Trotter’s body was found 25 days later in the Sam Houston National Forest.

Since then, Swearingen has been scheduled to die three times, with Aug. 18, 2011, the most recent execution date. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted a stay after ruling his petition met the requirements for another hearing.

As in previous hearings, Swearingen’s claim of innocence centers around his whereabouts at the time of Trotter’s death. Swearingen’s attorneys argued he was in the Montgomery County Jail when Trotter was killed, based on entomological (insect) evidence.

Now Swearingen’s attorneys are advancing the theory that microscopic slides of Trotter’s heart tissue will exonerate their client. They believe tests show decomposition of the samples is inconsistent with the prosecution’s timeline.

“Based on the condition of all the major internal organs of the body, it is biologically and scientifically impossible” for Trotter’s death to have occurred 25 days before her body was found, defense attorney Stephen Jackson said.

Relying on the sworn affidavits of five medical examiners, Jackson said the sample’s “degradation” was 14 days or less, and not indicative of a “25 day postmortem,” he said.

Swearingen was jailed on Dec. 11, 1998.

That theory differs greatly from that of the prosecution. Assistant District Attorney Warren Diepraam said tissue samples the DA’s Office had tested showed significant degradation.

“This is a long line of changed stories by the defense,” Diepraam said. “We look forward to presenting valid science to support our claims with the evidence the jury relied on.”

Each side had tissue samples submitted for analysis, Diepraam said.

While the condition of tissue samples is certain to be an important aspect of the hearing, Swearingen’s attorneys haven’t abandoned their belief that a “speck” of blood found underneath one of Trotter’s fingernails is from her real killer. DNA testing showed the blood did not match Swearingen’s.

In January, defense attorneys filed a motion to have that blood evidence resubmitted into CODIS - the national DNA database - for a possible match.

“It was two years since it (the speck) was put in CODIS to check against the other profiles,” Jackson said.

The prosecution explained that the speck of blood was a “transfer” that occurred during the handling of the body.

“That’s an argument of convenience,” Jackson said.

Diepraam said the defense has “never had a consistent theory” about the time of (Trotter’s) death.